Firing range for infosec testing opens in Canberra

After six months' of preparation, the University of New South Wales has opened a cyber-security research centre in Canberra it says is designed to bring together academia, government, defence and business expertise.

Sensibly, instead of having students with black-hat tendencies an interest in computer security practise on anything they can get a network connection to, the ACCS (Australian Centre for Cyber Security) will have a “practise range” for cyber attacks – and this will be outside the classified environment.

The ACCS's research specialities are to include “computer and network security, risk management, international politics and ethics, law, and big data analytics for security”. In other words: how to hack, how to prevent hacks, when it's okay to hack, and how to see whether a hack has happened.

The centre is located at the university's Canberra campus in the Australian Defence Force Academy. ®